Could you guys maybe print it on paper and send it to my physical mailbox, so I can do this ritual with breakfast? :-)

(I was very skeptical about Kagi Assistant but now i am a happy Kagi Ultimate subscriber).

I tended towards Axios but lately it's gotten a bit paywalled and less informative. Can't wait to incorporate Kagi News into my daily workflow.

I might not agree with all decisions Kagi makes, but this is gold. Endless scrolling is a big indicator that you're a consumer not a customer.

I feel this is what Apple News should've been. Instead it's just god-awful ad-filled mess of news articles. And the only reason I have it is because of Apple One. But it is a clearly neglected product.

I also pay for ground news but it hasn't met my expectations, mostly because there's a lot of redundancy with wire stories. Like it'll show 50 sources but they're all just regurgitating the same AP or Reuters article. So it skews the "bias"

Bunch of discussion here 3 months ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44518473

The UK section seems to have a heavy bias towards news from Scotland.

It looks too simplistic for me to actually use.

Apart from that, it's really nice! Good job, kagi team!

This is pulling the content of the RSS feeds of several news sites into the context window of an LLM and then asking it to summarize news items into articles and fill in the blanks?

I'm asking because that is what it looks like, but AI / LLMs are not specifically mentioned in this blog post, they just say news are 'generated' under the 'News in your language' heading, which seems to imply that is what they are doing.

I'm a little skeptical towards the approach, when you ask an LLM to point to 'sources' for the information it outputs, as far as I know there is no guarantee that those are correct – and it does seem like sometimes they just use pure LLM output, as no sources are cited, or it's quoted as 'common knowledge'.

News Minimalist [1] and Boring Report [2]. Both aggregate news and (IMO) most importantly provide links from multiple outlets for the same stories. Really made me notice the clickbait and allows me to be more selective in choosing reputable sources.

Both use AI, with the former ranking news based on importance, while the latter summarizes articles. (That doesn't feel useful for supporting journalism as a whole so I typically click through and read the articles unless I don't like the outlet reporting)

[1] https://www.newsminimalist.com/

[2] https://www.boringreport.org/app

[0] https://ivyreader.com

Are these articulated in a manner which gives stakeholders (investors, users, and staff) assurances and standing?

...

What are competitors and collaborators in this space? Semafor seems to have a similar product, what are the differentiators and/or collaboration opportunities?

...

Netflix was subscription only, till it was "pay to get rid of ads". Then there is the whole business of profiling customer interest, etc.

We have product labeling for food, why not web services?

However, I set my feed up on the web app seeing that it should sync on "all my devices".

Next, I installed the Android app, but there's no way to connect to my Kagi account.

So much for syncing...

Gives me a good high-level view of the news. I'm a Kagi customer and I definitely don't want anything they do with the news.

That said, I do think the service could be improved. Often the summary is a very short blurb that forces me to go to one of the original sites for the content, and hopefully land on one that is not obnoxious to use, which kind of defeats the purpose. The event timeline sounds interesting, but when it essentially shows 2 or 3 events that are obvious from the context, it's not so useful in practice. I always skip the "Quick questions" section, since it reads like an elementary school report, and the questions are really basic. How about letting me ask the questions I want?

Also:

> We don’t scrape content from websites. Instead, we use publicly available RSS feeds that publishers choose to provide.

I think this is a mistake. Most publishers are hostile to RSS and often don't offer it. Scraping is, unfortunately, a requirement if you want to consume public content on your own terms, which is the entire point of this service. Besides, scraping is how all search engines generate their index, so as long as the bot is well behaved and doesn't hammer the site, follows robots.txt or perhaps even bends the rules a bit, it should be fine. I would rather Kagi wasn't so respectful of publishers' wishes, if that would allow them to offer a better service. I understand if they want to avoid getting in trouble with publishers, but the alternative would be better for their users.

Nice release nonetheless!

Some things that could change that:

- Deep fact checking. Community Notes on twitter do a better job at this than any other system I've seen. The reason it doesn't really work in practice is that the stream of misinformation and confusion is orders of magnitude larger than the Community Notes community. A news app should not have that scalability issue.

- Follow up. If I read something that later turns out to be false I need to be notified of that. This unfortunately requires that the app track what I have read.

- Context. If you have a news article about a stabbing, it sounds like stabbings are up. The context that they are going up or down statistically is extremely relevant. The lack of context can turn a tiny truth into a bigger lie.

- Deep confusion analysis. Figuring out where people are confused statistically and focusing on trying to manage that misinformation gap is not something that is dealt with at all. I would like to become LESS confused by information sources not more.

[1] https://embit.ca

I've been really enjoying Semafor's emails too, but their 2x a day is tough for me to keep up with. I'll try to get a habit of looking at Kagi News to stay informed.

That's despite the appropriate HTTP header:

Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5

These guys are doing great work and this news product is exactly what I want... Once a day hit. What is happening in the world? As far as pmf goes they hit the mark for an old fart like me.

If you wanted to fix the news you'd begin by critically curating mainstream news and throwing 80% of it in the trash, then you'd add 80% of material and critical analysis back to the 20% that had none of that.

This example includes a Reddit post as a source:

https://kite.kagi.com/s/hjgy55

But that post is actually a link to reuters.com

There is also a list of "citations" which are referenced from the generated text, and "sources" which are not referenced anywhere. It's not clear if they used reddit or reuters to generate any of the text.

I also see lots of citations to "common knowledge"... which is um, weird.

For example:

> National Guard activation: Guard forces can serve under state control (Title 32) or be federalized (Title 10), which determines who directs missions and the scope of authority [*].

Is this common knowledge?

I know the announcement page talks about not scraping, but to me personally the value i see in this product is that i don't have to go to those ad ridden, poorly organized and often terrible pages of the authors. Which then seems really unfair to the actual content providers.

I'd like to see this type of service cost $3-5/m ontop of my normal Kagi sub to compensate the authors of the articles i read. I assume a very small amount since i doubt they'd be getting much actual money from my ad views.